Mañana and politics definitely lack merit

Over the past 24 years, I watched with a sense of guarded optimism the future of these isles as we rolled up our sleeves to actively partake in what’s known as the exercise of self-government. I had to follow the dictates of the majority. It’s democracy at work!

In the process, we adopted certain policies of the former Trust Territory Government, i.e., alien labor laws that limit foreign workers’ stay and a pile of other requirements intended to shield rather than empathize the future of local workers. We used these policies to rule and intimidate guest workers.

We built and insulated ourselves with the notion that we can replace them at will using the old TTG labor laws and all the warped and corrupting power that came with it. We never came to understand the change in the rules of the game–that guest workers are granted “equal protection–under the law in the new relationship. This attitudinal inadequacy was like a bad hang-over the next day after one drink too many the night before.

We further built and insulated ourselves with the arbitrary belief that certain job categories are reserved for guest workers, i.e., waitresses, bellboys, errand boys, gardeners, nearly all trades in the construction industry, to name a few. As we develop and strengthen this adolescent attitude, there were in fact hundreds upon hundreds of jobs available then throughout these isles. It was fueled by the boom era of the late eighties. In the end, we created jobs for guest workers and still felt it perfectly fine to embrace such policy.

We never really buckled down to encouraging our children to securing lifetime skills. The NMI steadily, though quickly, turned into a very permissive community further fueling our wonderful sense of mañana. The essence and importance of education was shoved aside, conveniently, with quiet self-proclamation of: “I saw nothing, heard nothing, don’t know anything”. In came the political patronage system into our lives where politicians built our superficial sense of confidence that we’d get good paying government jobs any and all the time. And more often than not, we found these jobs in both branches of government.

Through the years, we created a pool of redundant government employees who view success with their new jobs as ill-trained community workers, secretaries, among others, raking-in anywhere between $16,000 to $48,000 per year in, again, ill-earned loot. Would a community worker be willing to finish his high school education (GED) when he’s making more than a degreed teacher in one of our schools? No! Well, if moving and relocating picnic tables and canopies pays anywhere between $18,000 to $30,000 per year, why sweat it out at NMC, right? Is it fair to reward this group of drop-outs while punishing college educated or degreed teachers for taking the extra mile to secure lifetime skills?

It is really demoralizing, isn’t it? We grandly pay community workers (most of whom are high school drop-outs) while limiting competitive pay for teachers and nurses to a minimum. How ironic that we equally spend millions of dollars on scholarship programs only to slam the brakes of opportunities against returning college graduates. It’s all politics or the political patronage system that has proven, time and again, that it definitely lacks merit all around. It is time that this adolescent or unpublished policy of failure is filed permanently in the “dead” folder to be opened only when planet earth smashes against Jupiter.

The crippling effects of mañana and political patronage has finally caught up with us at the most inopportune time. Only this time, friends, there aren’t anymore scapegoats to vent our frustrations on other than ourselves. In fact, we’ve rediscovered the enemy and “The Enemy Is Us!”